The Glass Cage: Automation and Us

In The Glass Cage, bestselling author Nicholas Carr digs behind the headlines about factory robots and self-driving cars, wearable computers and digitized medicine, as he explores the hidden costs of granting software dominion over our work and our leisure. Even as they bring ease to our lives, these programs are stealing something essential from us.

Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

Consider Facebook - it's human contact, only easier to engage with and easier to avoid. Developing technology promises closeness. Sometimes it delivers, but much of our modern life leaves us less connected with people and more connected to simulations of them. In Alone Together, MIT technology and society professor Sherry Turkle explores the power of our new tools and toys to dramatically alter our social lives.

Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

In this witty, often terrifying work of cultural criticism, Postman chronicles our transformation into a Technopoly: a society that no longer merely uses technology as a support system but instead is shaped by it. According to Postman, technology is rapidly gaining sovereignty over social institutions and national life to become self-justifying, self-perpetuating, and omnipresent. He warns that this will have radical consequences for the meanings of politics, art, religion, family, education, and more.

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations

With a razor wit, Nicholas Carr cuts through Silicon Valley's unsettlingly cheery vision of the technological future to ask a hard question: Have we been seduced by a lie? Gathering a decade's worth of posts from his blog, Rough Type, as well as his seminal essays, Utopia Is Creepy offers an alternative history of the digital age, chronicling its roller-coaster crazes and crashes, its blind triumphs, and its unintended consequences.

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You

In December 2009, Google began customizing its search results for each user. Instead of giving you the most broadly popular result, Google now tries to predict what you are most likely to click on. According to MoveOn.org board president Eli Pariser, Google's change in policy is symptomatic of the most significant shift to take place on the Web in recent years: the rise of personalization.

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of advertising enticements, branding efforts, sponsored social media, commercials and other efforts to harvest our attention. Over the last century, few times or spaces have remained uncultivated by the "attention merchants", contributing to the distracted, unfocused tenor of our times. Tim Wu argues that this is not simply the byproduct of recent inventions, but the end result of more than a century's growth and expansion in the industries that feed on human attention.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It's a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a superpower in our increasingly competitive 21st-century economy.

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

All our lives are constrained by limited space and time, limits that give rise to a particular set of problems. What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of new activities and familiar favorites is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not: computers, too, face the same constraints, so computer scientists have been grappling with their version of such problems for decades.

The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30)

Let's take stock of young America. Compared to previous generations, American youth have more schooling (college enrollments have never been higher); more money ($100 a week in disposable income); more leisure time (five hours a day); and more news and information (Internet, The Daily Show, RSS feeds). What do they do with all that time and money? They download, upload, IM, post, chat, and network. (Nine of their top ten sites are for social networking.) They watch television and play video games (2 to 4 hours per day).

Ego Is the Enemy

"While the history books are filled with tales of obsessive visionary geniuses who remade the world in their images with sheer, almost irrational force, I've found that history is also made by individuals who fought their egos at every turn, who eschewed the spotlight, and who put their higher goals above their desire for recognition." (From the prologue)

It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens

What is new about how teenagers communicate through services such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram? Do social media affect the quality of teens' lives? In this eye-opening book, youth culture and technology expert Danah Boyd uncovers some of the major myths regarding teens' use of social media. She explores tropes about identity, privacy, safety, danger, and bullying. Ultimately, Boyd argues that society fails young people when paternalism and protectionism hinder teenagers' ability to become informed, thoughtful, and engaged citizens through their online interactions.

The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics

Everyone knows this kind of politician: a charismatic maverick who goes up against the system and its ways, but thinks he doesn't have to live by the rules. Using his experience as a speechwriter, Barton Swaim tells the story of a band of believers who attach themselves to this sort of ambitious narcissist.

The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living

Why have history's greatest minds - from George Washington to Frederick the Great to Ralph Waldo Emerson along with today's top performers, from Super Bowl-winning football coaches to CEOs and celebrities - embraced the wisdom of the ancient Stoics? Because they realize that the most valuable wisdom is timeless and that philosophy is for living a better life, not a classroom exercise. The Daily Stoic offers a daily devotional of Stoic insights and exercises, featuring all-new translations.

Contagious Culture: Show Up, Set the Tone, and Intentionally Create an Organization That Thrives

You are about to enter a new era of leadership. With more competition, more connectedness, and more opportunities than ever before, this exciting new era demands a workplace culture that is collaborative, productive, energized, and contagious. A culture that encourages extraordinary growth and innovation. A culture that starts with you - showing up, setting the tone, and lighting the fire....

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better

In Smarter Than You Think, Thompson documents how every technological innovation - from the printing press to the telegraph - has provoked the very same anxieties that plague us today. We panic that life will never be the same, that our attentions are eroding, that culture is being trivialized. But as in the past, we adapt, learning to use the new and retaining what’s good of the old.

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

Much of what will happen in the next 30 years is inevitable, driven by technological trends that are already in motion. In this fascinating, provocative new book, Kevin Kelly provides an optimistic road map for the future, showing how the coming changes in our lives - from virtual reality in the home to an on-demand economy to artificial intelligence embedded in everything we manufacture - can be understood as the result of a few long-term accelerating forces.

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

In this must-listen book for anyone striving to succeed, pioneering psychologist Angela Duckworth shows parents, educators, students, and businesspeople - both seasoned and new - that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent but a focused persistence called "grit". Why do some people succeed and others fail? Sharing new insights from her landmark research on grit, MacArthur "genius" Angela Duckworth explains why talent is hardly a guarantor of success.

Pre-Suasion: Channeling Attention for Change

The author of the legendary best seller Influence, social psychologist Robert Cialdini, shines a light on effective persuasion and reveals that the secret doesn't lie in the message itself but in the key moment before that message is delivered.

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

In The Unwinding, George Packer, author of The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, tells the story of the United States over the past three decades in an utterly original way, with his characteristically sharp eye for detail and gift for weaving together complex narratives. The Unwinding portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and points the way forward to mutual understanding. His starting point is moral intuition - the nearly instantaneous perceptions we all have about other people and the things they do. These intuitions feel like self-evident truths, making us righteously certain that those who see things differently are wrong. Haidt shows us how these intuitions differ across cultures, including the cultures of the political left and right.

Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

Have you ever wanted to learn a language or pick up an instrument, only to become too daunted by the task at hand? Expert performance guru Anders Ericsson has made a career of studying chess champions, violin virtuosos, star athletes, and memory mavens. Peak condenses three decades of original research to introduce an incredibly powerful approach to learning that is fundamentally different from the way people traditionally think about acquiring a skill.

You Are Not a Gadget: Being Human in an Age of Technology

Jaron Lanier, a Silicon Valley visionary since the 1980s, was among the first to predict the revolutionary changes the World Wide Web would bring to commerce and culture. Now, in his first book, written more than two decades after the web was created, Lanier offers this provocative and cautionary look at the way it is transforming our lives for better and for worse.

The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day

In The Improbability Principle, the renowned statistician David J. Hand argues that extraordinarily rare events are anything but. In fact, they’re commonplace. Not only that, we should all expect to experience a miracle roughly once every month.

But Hand is no believer in superstitions, prophecies, or the paranormal. His definition of "miracle" is thoroughly rational. No mystical or supernatural explanation is necessary to understand why someone is lucky enough to win the lottery twice, or is destined to be hit by lightning three times and still survive.

Publisher's Summary

The best-selling author of The Big Switch returns with an explosive look at technology’s effect on the mind.

“Is Google making us stupid?” When Nicholas Carr posed that question in an Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: as we enjoy the Internet’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply?

Now, Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration yet published of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences. Weaving insights from philosophy, neuroscience, and history into a rich narrative, The Shallows explains how the Internet is rerouting our neural pathways, replacing the subtle mind of the book reader with the distracted mind of the screen watcher. A gripping story of human transformation played out against a backdrop of technological upheaval, The Shallows will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds.

I am currently listening to books that help me better understand the impact of the Internet on our lives. Though we will not understand the impact of the Internet for years to come, "The Shallows" aptly contributes to that understanding. I has pleased to see that this book was a thoughtful, patient, and informed presentation.
Essentially, Carr suggests that our ability to focus, concentrate and think is being altered in ways we are yet to understand. Hence, we are being pushed into the intellectual "shallows." Multitasking is not necessarily helpful to learning and understanding. Data does not necessarily equal wisdom. We are not as reflective as we need to be. I suppose that if you believe that tools determine behavior or if you believe behavior determines the use of tools will determine if you encounter the Internet with optimism or pessimism.
Thoughtfully written and Garcia’s reading is great.

A very worth while listen, and deserving an actual read. There are many provocative yet trite "science for the masses" books. This is not one of them. Carr does a wonderful job of addressing a complicated and far reaching concern and educating the reader to many topics while surveying a great deal prior work.

Additionally, the narration is quite pleasant, though the irony of listening to this book is inescapable.

After listening I intend to buy a print copy for further review and to track down its sources.

There is a lot of back and forth in the press--and here in these reviews--about whether or not the 24/7 online status of today's American culture is eroding the mental capabilities of the current generation. As someone who has been teaching college English for 25 years and has seen both sides of the divide, I can clearly say: YES, IT IS. This book tells it like it is, and how it is--unfortunately--is that the average attention span is growing painfully shorter and shorter due to the constant distracting allure (?!) of cellphones, texting, and the ever-present availability of the Internet on cellphones, Ipads, tablets, etc. It only makes sense: the brain becomes rewired for short-term attention to fleeting images and interactions, and so more longer demands on focus begin to feel like running a marathon after having spent the last five years on the couch. And not only has it clearly eroded students' ability to pay attention and take part in class discussions--it has also seriously damaged relationships, trading FB BFF's for real-life friendships. If you doubt it, go to any college campus and watch for a while: how many people do you see talking with each other, and how many do you see with their heads in their 3'X3" electronic worlds, thumbs going like mad about the latest cat video--or whatever it is they are looking at. We are getting less attentive, more stupid, and less interactive, and this can not bode well for the future. Read this book; get the truth--and then rejoin the real world.

Since a long while I had a feeling of being able to concentrate less and less on long texts. I would start to read a book but soon check something on the internet instead, switching between book and internet and finally sticking to the net in the end. Nicholas Carr explains not only why I had that strong urge to jump to the net, but also (among other things) why later on I would have to struggle to remember what I read in the book.
I highly recomend this book to everyone who wonders why its so difficult to part with the net for longer periods of time.

I wanted to hate this book, and there is plenty of passionate negativity on the internet about it - mainly from those who haven't read it. The author brings an historical perspective to how technology has fundamentally changed how our minds operate. You wont like what he has to say, but you'll agree with his findings.

The Shallows is not a new book. It has been out for about two years and many people, much smarter than I have had their take at it. My short review, Carr has lots of good points, which tend to be lost amidst his hyperbole and cherry picked stats.

At the center of this argument is that people are reading books less. And he has some statistics from the Bureau of Labor to show this. But the National Endowment for the Arts study shows the largest increase in reading in decades (in all types of reading except poetry). Right off the bat, this severely undercuts his argument. The NEA study came out after the book, so I don’t blame him for not using it. But even if it had come out I think he would have disputed it. Because in that study a novel is counted as reading a novel no matter what format you read it in. But Carr does not believe that.

“An ebook is no more related to a book than an online newspaper is related to a print newspaper.” (By which, he means that they are not hardly related at all in the context of the quote.)

“Electronic text is impermanent…it seems likely that that removing the sense of closure from book writing will in time will alter writer’s attitudes toward their work. Their pressure to achieve perfection will diminish as well as the artistic rigor that it imposed… One only need to glance at the history of correspondence…the cost will be a further severing of the intellectual attachment between the lone reader and the lone writer…”

My biggest complaint is that Carr uses a very broad definition of the net and alternates between examples to fit his need. For instance he talks about the immediacy and interactivity of the net at one point and gives examples of a teen texting a friend. But that interaction is fundamentally different from reading a blog post or watching a YouTube video. Yes the common thread is that all use the means of the internet, but to pretend that they actually give us interaction in a similar way or that they are creating ‘neural pathways’ in a similar way as one another or reinforcing the same neural pathways seems to be stretching reality. In this same example he complains that ‘When we are online we are lost to the world around us.” Which is essentially the same thing that he says holds up as important about reading a book, what he said was lost about reading an ebook or reading online. So he wants us lost in a book, but not lost on a webpage?

There are a lot of good points here. One of them is that they type of work that we do lends itself to short term immediate thinking and crowds out some of the background processing that our brains use for creative thinking. I heard another author make a similar point this way in an interview. The author said, if you want to be a writer you need a job that is physically active and mentally easy. That is why so many authors are laborers or waiters. Office work requires active use of the brain throughout the day and does not allow for background thinking (not to mention doesn’t give us the physical exercise we need to stay healthy.

Another very good point is that reading texts that have hyperlinks and pulled out text and video and images requires our brains to constantly evaluate the importance of that particular item. Do you want to click on the link or not? Even though these thoughts are subconscious they still prevent us from obtaining full concentration on the meaning of the text. But this is more a formatting issues than ‘internet’ issue. Because he complains about this for ebooks, but does not bring it up on the formatting of paper books (no links, but end notes, footnotes and sidebar would have a similar effect.)

Continually, I think that my frustration with this book is that he is trying to make the case too strongly and too broadly. There are advantages of the internet (which he admits) that offset some of the negatives. But there are also ways to minimize the negatives through better design (which he seems to minimize the possibility). For instance in dedicated ebook readers present the text without distraction most of the time. I only use the dictionary when I don’t know what a word means, but otherwise, I never use wikipedia or websearch while reading my kindle. I leave sharing options and wifi off when I am reading, I don’t want to be bothered, I want to read the book. Encouraging single use devices instead of multi-use devices can aid in concentration. If you look at my review of reading on the ipad from 2 years ago, my main complaint was that it wasn’t single use.

Also I know many writers that have started using various distraction apps in their computer. These apps are full screen, no formatting and they disable all sound and sometimes even disable all other programs in the background. They even have options to gray out all of the text that you are not working on, so your immediate line or paragraph is black, but everything else is gray.

Carr makes the case well that we should not expect the internet or computers to make us smarter. I know that there are those that believe that and write about that. But Carr does not really look at the opposite. He shows that the internet is changing our brains (as does everything that we do), but is that really making us dumber? Is it helping us adapt to the world around us? Carr brings up many issues of concern. But on the whole I feel that his treatment of those issues once they are brought is lacking. Strawmen and Cherry-picked data abound. In those areas that I have done some independent research on outside of this book, I find his work very one sided. Which makes me doubt the veracity of the data that I do not have a prior background in.

On the whole I recommend the book if you have an interest about how the history of technology changes (that section was very good) or an intro to brain science (also good, but if anything he underplays this case). But in the end I felt like the book was lacking in balance and restraint. For a better treatment of the general problems with technology I would read John Dyer’s From the Garden. It includes an equally good understanding of the role of technology, but is much more balanced and useful.

Unfortunately, this is the first audiobook I've ever stopped listening to because of the narration. The text of the book would warrant a higher rating, but I found the narrator distractingly bad.

I realize these things are often a matter of personal taste, but a warning to those with sensitive ears: definitely make sure to listen to the sample first. If you find yourself squirming after 30 seconds, I promise you'll be screaming after 30 minutes.

I plan to finish reading a physical copy of the book, as it's quite interesting. So if you can handle the narrator, by all means check it out.

I'm a big Carr fan and his latest soap box does not disappoint. Really fascinating to hear his take on what is happening to our brains as the result of our always-on lifestyle. Not only does Carr explain this through current science but also comparing it to another key development in how our brains have been shaped - the printing press.

I loved the provocative subject, but also the very balanced approach the author takes to the question. I was surprised (pleasantly) at the quality and variety of useful background that was provided. Some great research was done here ... the narration was great. I also bought to printed book, so that I could mark and note some passages for review later.

I am a very big fan of modern tech and culture. I was expecting a rant with snippets of usable information. I found the opposite here. :-) There is a good balance of positive and negative ideas on what is happening to us as modern humans. The book is long and wordy but that may be due to recent evolution. (This will make sense after you read the book)